I HOPE YOU WILL READ ALL THE WAY TO THE END TODAY.A barrage of “hate Democrats” mail is pouring daily into my e-mail box. Some of it is explicitly worded in ways that could easily encourage emotionally/mentally unstable persons to feel as if they must take action literally to “exterminate” Democrats.

I remember that fall in 1963 when the same kind of rhetoric was aimed at Democrats generally and at one Democrat in particular, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I remember particularly a woman whose name I shall never forget, Norma Torgason, a Sacramento Valley talk-radio “personality,” a forerunner of the likes of Rush Limbaugh. I was English Department chair of a high school in The Valley; she took aim at me for “encouraging students to read” books like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and for my refusal to censure a teacher in my department for having lent to one of her students Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice... and for my open participation in projects and election campaigns favored by Democrats. Her campaign of hate-filled rhetoric resulted in my having to send my family away from the area for a short time while law enforcement agencies searched for a person who was making threatening telephone calls to our house. The caller always said he knew where and when my children went from place to place in the community and that I should be prepared to have them disappear. The calls were traced. The caller was found. Things settled back to what could be considered “normal” for that time and for that part of California. Much to the delight of Norma Torgason, I later left the country to take a job at the American School in Singapore. Ms. Torgason announced to her listening audience that I was leaving the United States to live in Communist China. I have always wondered of she really thought Singapore is in China or that she simply knew her faithful listeners wouldn’t know the difference anyway.

In November of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald murdered the President of the United States. It is important for me to make clear that I do not believe the Republican Party was responsible for his death. America is as strong as it is partly because of its two-party political environment. Healthy balance between the two parties is a good thing. It’s when either of the parties panders to lunatic fringe elements in our society and resorts to hate propaganda that we get into clear and present danger.

I remember very clearly the nature of those hate campaigns in the late 50s and early 60s. The President’s ethnicity and race were not the focus of the Republican Party’s fringe far right wing. Nobody doubted that John F. Kennedy was a legitimate citizen. It was his religion. Beginning before his election and gaining momentum steadily after he took office, J.F.K. was the target of a carefully orchestrated campaign to convince Americans that a Catholic president would take his orders from the Pope in Rome. You know the tragic end of that story. It took only one assassin to end the President’s life.

Why am I thinking about those days in this summer of 2010? Today I received an e-mail that goes beyond simple invective, a message that could easily persuade an unhinged political wing nut that it is his or her duty to take deadly action. I know the person who sends me these messages. The messages are not composed by him. I don’t believe he is a violent, sick person. I do believe he is operating from a deep well of misinformation and ignorance... from which he probably will never climb out; that has been the case for him for many years. That wouldn’t worry me quite so much; his writing is not as clever nor as persuasive as the messages he sends. The messages are circulating around the country; when he gets them he just sends them on to a great number of people on his mailing list. The messages are a clear call to action. I am frankly worried, as are many other Americans, that the campaigns of hate, often framed in religious language, will bring another catastrophe like that tragic day in the November 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated.

Today’s message:

    The last four letters in Democrats.........Rats
      
Remember, November is to be set aside as rodent extermination month.